I wrote the initial draft of this post using my Ipod’s WordPress application [1], tip-tapping away as I sat in the very class that inspired it.
A required class is worse than an elective class. A simple and inevitable process ensures this. Making any college course a requirement for graduation ensures that more students will enroll in the course. This enrollment will necessarily include disinterested students- kids who would never take the class if they didn’t have to. These students will only meet the minimum standards to achieve graduation.
A mass of disinterested students sucks the life out of a classroom. Responses must be pulled like so many teeth, and more people sleep and scribble on their desks than take notes. Out of boredom, a few play games on their laptops or write blog entries on their iPods. No one makes the effort to go over the required readings. No one shows up to class if they have a choice. Usually, attendance is made into a requirement itself.
A course with many enrolled students also tends to have more specific, rigid standards in terms of assignments and grading. Instructors have less freedom to shape the course as they see fit. This, along with the larger enrollment, creates a heavy load of paperwork. More essays need grading, more syllabi need copying, attendance points need tabulating, more students need tutoring during office hours.
Because a required course demands so many man-hours, the department in question may decide to pass responsibilities on to a TA. TAs have less experience teaching and usually already find themselves already swamped in the demands of graduate student life. And since a required course typically has very broad content, the poor TA may not have appropriate expertise in all facets of the class. Often they arrive to class as miserable as the students; both parties forced into a drudgery they do not want.
When a university gives a course its special “required” status, it creates the perfect conditions for truly underwhelming educational experience. It creates a large, unmotivated classroom of just-about-to-graduate students, bored to tears with the assigned busy work, watched over by a stressed, under appreciated TA who lacks the support, respect and freedom to whip his wards into intellectual vigor.
In my experience, “required” courses have always presented the worst educational experience, with the lowest expectations (by necessity) and the dullest content. Your mileage may vary– my complaints could just represent the symptoms of going to a very large (very very large) school. Here, at least, the problem is very striking. So, if you perchance run a department or college at The Ohio State University, and you want your students to learn something meaningful, don’t require it.
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